New Robin's Egg Blue Pontil

[RED Matthews]

Hello Jordan and others. When I have a bottle or two without a stopper, I will usually take them with me when I go to the bottle shows. I have found many matches for my needy bottles this way. I have had my best luck here at the Florida bottle shows.

RED Matthews

 

[cannibalfromhannibal]

Aster, the stopper measures 2 3/4" long and is 1/2" wide at the very end and flares out to another 1/8" near the top seat. Red has an excellent point and one I have used in the past after numerous "misses" of trying to guess a size. Since they were usually ground for a specific bottle, sometimes even the "correct" size doesn't work. It's best to try and see if it actually fits. Sometime you have to play with them and turn them until they do fit, but more often they will (or close enough) than not. Problem usually arises when they fit too well! Easy for them to get stuck tight. Which reminds me of a recent and potentially disasterous mistake I made. I dug a early pontiled Lubin perfume bottle missing the stopper. Well, not long after, I dug another one with a stopper stuck tight. I tried all the tricks suggested here in an earlier post with no luck. I finally made the decision to try to remove it by heating it with hot water, knowing I'd likely break the bottle. Neither happened. So I decided to stick it in the microwave for 60 seconds, expecting it to break as it was half full of blackish looking water. Nothing happened again! But it sure was heated so I put it in the sink and turned on the water, and KABOOM! It exploded like a couple of M-80's, and having a misspent youth, I know what M-80's sound like! Well, I found the neck with the stopper still stuck tight in the sink, but every other part of the bottle just seemed to have vaporized! I finally found most of the pieces in the toilet 15 feet away in the adjacent bathroom! It apparently blew off in one main direction, luckily not in my face, or I could have easily been blinded. But I finally pried the stopper free and it made a perfect fit, so in the end I was successful, but at a cost that could have been total disaster. Jack

 

[Asterx]

So I decided to stick it in the microwave for 60 seconds, expecting it to break as it was half full of blackish looking water. Nothing happened again! But it sure was heated so I put it in the sink and turned on the water, and KABOOM! It exploded like a couple of M-80's, and having a misspent youth, I know what M-80's sound like! Well, I found the neck with the stopper still stuck tight in the sink, but every other part of the bottle just seemed to have vaporized! I finally found most of the pieces in the toilet 15 feet away in the adjacent bathroom! It apparently blew off in one main direction, luckily not in my face, or I could have easily been blinded

!!! Wow, thats a good precautionary tale for bottle collectors... I guess your "misspent" youth paid off a little. Just think of all the beautiful bottles you'd be missing if you were blinded though... I guess you'd come to appreciate the finer details of embossing []

And thanks Red and Jack for the ideas on finding a replacement stopper.

 

[cannibalfromhannibal]

I'm beginning to think it just might eventually come to that......."Yep, I remember well the day I dug that one, with that big 'ol gator starin' right back at me and CURE embossed with it!"........I wish! (For the swamp cure , not blindness!)..... Someday......Jack